The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, France, from 12 to 14 November 2018. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Hi, everyone. We're about to start. Welcome to GIF 2018 BPF Gender and Internet Governance. We are trying to do a roundtable, we don't have the set up here. We will do what we can. I am here leading the session. We have a round of speakers. I will introduce the speakers that we have. Agustina Callegari, from the Internet Society. She's the global engagement manager at ISOC and drives the sustainability development there. And guides the BPF access and helping us put this together.
We have Anri van der Spuy leading the project, and Rapporteur for the BPF agenda in 2015 and 2016 which were the founding stones for us to do the work in 2018.
We have Nicola Bidwell, who is the gender and social impact facilitator for APC, the local access project they do. It focuses on community networks. We will hear more about that today.
We have with us Ritu Srivastava, the gender manager at research in India.
And we have Rashi (?), the community manager at the Patel project in India.
We have Bruna Martins dos Santos, she's up ‑‑ she was there behind, she will come up later during the session. Bruna is a consultant and researchers at coding rights where she works with the legislative support.
And we have Alejandra Erramuspe , who is here, okay. Hi, hi, Alejandra. Can you come ‑‑ would you like to come up? Okay. We can call you up when your segment starts. So we have Alejandra, a MAG member and the communication manager and governance society and the government of Uruguay. This team we have is the impact of supplementary models in enabling the gender. It is a long name. We will break it down what we mean with this.
When we say supplementary models of activity, we will not go into the technical aspects of this. We're trying to focus on the gender aspect here.
Just to clarify what we mean is complementary telecommunication infrastructure models that speed up the space at which unconnected populations can be connected to the Internet. Examples are community networks, public Wi‑Fi. TV white spaces, zero rate and such. Meaningful Internet access is something the BPF has moved to where we're trying to envision Internet access and meaningful Internet access that is beneficial to the user at the end of the day. Whatever benefits I'm trying to accrue from the Internet, be it empowerment, active participation in the public, et cetera. Those are rights that I will actually be able to gain through this kind of access. When we say "women" we are including girls and anyone that identifies as women. The social construct of gender. And we're very importantly talking about gender as a spectrum. So when we say gender nonbinary persons, we're talking about people who don't identify within the gender binary of male or female.
Can we go to the next slide, please? Okay. Thank you. So we have functioned in a bottom‑up manner. We take all of the information and go from that matter. We try to have individuals as speakers and multi stakeholders representing the work.
It started off 2015, Anri was the Rapporteur and it was in the gender abuse and minority focus on women's. And 2016 was the barriers to women Internet access. In 2017, we realized, the barriers what have identified different communities of women experience the barriers differently. Therefore, 2017's work tried to look at different communities of women, refugee women, L.G.B.T.Q. I. Women and how it impacts them on the Internet. We're building upon the work and working on supplements in the community, Wi‑Fi and et cetera and how they have an impact on the different communities of women in helping them access the Internet.
Can you go to the next slide, please. Okay. So I will just very quickly go through the methodology here. But we have our draft output paper that is up on the comments. An encourage all of you to go and read that so you will have a much more detail understanding of the work we're doing. Very briefly, the method we use to get our findings today were two surveys, two online surveys, one through Google forms, the other was a line survey, which APC had us host. Thank you, we had virtual meetings and team calls on weekly to once every two weeks kind of a thing, where we try to introduce some calls where we had teams. For example, one team was gender nonbinary persons and Internet access to them. We had people from those communes talking to us about the problems. You're not trying to get inputs from everyone involved. And mobile messages, thanks to Renata we were able to set up. Renata is here today, so thank you Renata. We're basically allowing people to send us messages on WhatsApp and other mobile applications to send in their inputs. We had our mailing list continued so people could send their submissions and a separate e‑mail I.D. dedicated for submissions. This IGF session where we hope to have a great session and discuss with the participants here and move forward our findings. Can we go to the next slide? Thank you. So I'm going to quickly go through some of the mean findings, just to contextualize the discussion that will happen in this session today.
Again, as I said, the detailed findings are in the paper, so feel free to access that on the website. Some of the barriers identified in the previous years for women and nongender binary persons to access the Internet, we think having supplemental models of connectivity, you can overcome to an extent some of the barriers. Some of the analysis includes for example, availability is the first barrier that we ‑‑ is the first barrier that was identified in the previous year, where women had no access to broadband and for example, if public Internet centers were in spaces where women could not culturally access because of restrictions to their movements. Supplementing models of activity can help this concern by providing greater ownership to the users, for example, community networks which are owned by the community and governed to democratic principles will give more ownership over the availability to avoid ‑‑ get the benefits. Affordability in terms of devices, data and whether or not someone has disposable income and financial liquidity to make the decisions and connect to the Internet. A lot of supplementary models are structured in a way they are offering low cost and free alternative methods so women can avail of this in cases where women, girl, children are often not given the same financial independence as boys in a lots of places around the world.
Third is culture and norms. This is an important finding, right. The reason a lot of women cannot connect to the Internet today is because there are a lot of cultural norms that stop them from doing that. The problem is not the mobile phone, it is the power dynamics around the phone. Women are prohibited about accessing the Internet. And there are ideas about what is good. If you connect and speak to persons online, you are not a good woman any more. We find it difficult to tackle this barrier. Supplemental models cannot address this. We need a focus on culture and norms to solve this, but it is an important finding for us to put out here. The fourth is in terms of availability of relevant content. If women connect to the Internet because of reasons like literacy gap or girls are socialized to have lesser confidence than boys when accessing ICTs, et cetera. You are not able to get relevant content on the Internet. Supplementary models such as zero rating, allow you to ‑‑ that indicate or do. Therefore in this base, if you focus on women and nongender binary persons you can get this benefit and overcome this barrier.
Last is decision and rules pertaining to the Internet, we think it is important for women and nongender binary users to be active in decisions on the Internet. We understand while the models can help you access the Internet, it does not have to be translated to power. Hopefully we will get more ideas about this in the session and we invite all participants, also when we open up the floor for discussion. Thank you.
So lastly, why are we focusing on supplementary models of connectivity from agenda focus, right? It is really important for us to note at the foremost the technology does not have neutral impact and it does and often does create social, economic, cultural inequalities where it is deployed. This is something we observe in the models we look at today. When we say agenda for this, we're looking at how the same policies or social phenomena will impact women, nonbinary gender, queer persons different which is why it is important to look for gender specifically and not add it as an add on when you audit at the end.
Another thing to keep in mind, when you speak of gender, we are never speaking as gender, it is also in terms of it interjecting with sex, religion, class, and can't homogenize women, and that will come out repeatedly in the session and something that is focused on in the previous sections of BPF as well.
Okay.
So one of the key findings is that in this way, the gender focus is really limited in most of the initiatives that we have found. So while there are many initiatives, let's say tackle community networks, there aren't any with a specific gender focus in the way I have been talking about it. We did not encounter any initiatives that specifically focused on gender nonbinary persons, it is just that we haven't experienced those persons, we treat it as more inputs and add to this ‑‑ you can go to the next. Thank you
Okay. I just put on the board some initiatives, I will not go to the details of these. You will find more about this in the paper. These are some of the initiatives that we found specifically focusing on women in community networks. The next slide. Okay. We have Nic here as well, that will be able to talk to us more during the session during the agenda focus of community networks. I will read one slide to contextualize that. The annual and claims about women in community networks are shaped on course that are white, and male, it makes it difficult to escape the relations in the global south exist in the same form as the global north. This is one of the ways it is important for us to really look through the gender perspective we are talking about when we analyze the different models of activity. We will do that more during the day. We put up a few initiatives on TVwide spaces which is another supplementary model of ‑‑ unused frequencies in the wireless spectrum you're used to the connectivity. We're happy to get more input. These were the key findings we had in our paper. I will start off the first segment for today's session. The first segment is about how we want ‑‑ we have realized, okay, there aren't a lot of initiatives that are focusing on gender. So what can we do if I am an initiative to focus on gender on in the models, what do I have to do? What do we want to propose? Those are things we would like to open up for the session and discuss right now. We can start off with Anri, will you be able to talk to us about the idea of the gender perspective.
The fact that all people need to connect to the Internet, but specifically focusing on gender and binary persons. What is the need, where does that rise from? We can help contextualize it with the rest of the conversation
>> ANRI VAN DER SPUY: Sure. I will try to do that. We should take a step back and consider where this came from. That is an interesting finding itself. The first year I focused on online abuse and then we understood it was one of many barriers to access. Alongside that connecting and enabling the next billion, there was a focus on after issues. That comes from the assumption if you have access that will not necessarily solve your problems.
The reason for focusing on gender specifically when it comes to the access. The statistics don't lie a big gap between men and women. Yes, a challenge in the sense that we only look at male‑female in most of the statistics. And the statistics we have at the moment by itself, the male female binary, that encouraging broader classification is difficult. Developed countries struggle to get the data up‑to‑date and in on time. And the disparity is also an estimate. It is a big challenge. And you look at priest developed countries, et cetera ‑‑ least developed countries, et cetera and they struggle to enable and gather data and why this gap and why to focus on women specifically. The reason to focus on women, lock at barriers, like education affordability structural and cultural barriers to prevent women from access. A lot of those impact women worse than men. The organization I work for is research SD Africa. We see that in surveys that are representative. The fact that many who are unconnected are already people in rural areas or have low levels of income. Often gender isn't such a big factor, it is more where you are located in the rural area, and you don't to have a location and income. If you look at the gender weather, that is a determining factor. The fact is most people are located on the bottom layer. I have to qualify, the information is anecdote with the exception of some data that which is governed by the after access network. And the data from ITU is dated and aggregated which is a good indicator of the difficulties. It speaks to broader need to look at the other issues. It is often not just gender as a determining factor.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Anri. The lack of gender data even in the large data sets, everything. To the ability to analyze gender when you don't have a specific gender‑aggregated data is something important, hopefully if we point out there will be efforts made to correcting that. Thank you for your insights. We want to go to Nic. You have done a lot of work on community networks, can you tell us about the difficulties you have had about gender impacts on networks and what do they need to do to incorporate the gender perspectives, since one of the findings is there isn't a specific gender perspective involved at the time this was formed.
>> NIC: That's correct. I am pass cover the past year's work with the APC project. I have done interviews in six correspondents, and I'm only just starting to analyze the data because I just got back from Indonesia shortly ago. There are things that are categorizing. Another thing is I had a year, exploratory research, the role was to look at social and gender impacts. So the general frame of increasing the opportunities for success in community networks. This has the limitation of limiting the focus. I think this will come in these projects.
Secondly, the idea of community networks themselves are collectivists. Telecommunication networks built by citizens for citizens you are connected in some way but you might not have the research as in other networks.
Two had the classic build it ourselves model. The remainder were supported by the entity. Often that was quite gender sensitive. Not always. Perhaps more problematic, it was separated from the community itself. So it didn't know how to provide me access to the women I wanted. In the female I have men and women focus groups. I tried to create ways to have women speak openly.
There is difficulty in that and we will come back to that.
I was log at religions, economic circumstances, ranging from low income groups to people who had quite good income and education from equality values from 3 sites had three low gender inequality and one had high for the country. This shortness of time and covering a lot of topics, there is difficulty in locating the gender differences themselves. It becomes superficial and doesn't hit the point you mentioned. Returning to the ethic of the collective versus the individual.
I always share my research methods beforehand. Everyone was welcoming. I had not met a single person that was not supportive of the gender perspective. All the men I worked with were all supportive. Supportive doesn't mean they knew what to do I would ask for male and female stroke translators. Only one network provided me that. Sometimes I got external ones but that comes with the disadvantage that they're not part of the community. So you have this kind of double‑edged sword. A couple of times, when I ‑‑ some of the women asked can we have a women‑only space for this. Some of the delightful male facilitators that were from the community were hurt to not be included in the space. We're talking about community so these things matter. We don't want to go around hurting people's feelings in our communities. That comes in the pair relations. I would find a space with women and men would loiter around and would not give her the space to speak privately. That happened in a couple of countries, it was particularly difficult.
So to answer your question about what do community networks need to do to start including a gender perspective, I would like to say most are in some way or they're very receptive, but don't always know what to do.
One thing I want to remind about the community network that I studied in rural places is a community network is part of every somebody's everyday life, you don't leave it behind when you come home from work. It is part of your families, your loves, frustrations, all of those type of things. The answer to agenda perspective can't be taught down. It has to come within the living system of a community network, which is very complicated to achieve. It is interesting to note that one of the community networks that there was most gender inequality was also the one where for political reasons a woman was put in the front of it. I think that suggests to us this cannot be a kind of superficial, just put somebody in charge and let's hope that will work. That is more of a political act than actually an act that helps people have agency.
So there were varied community networks, but most were built on a structure, like an indigenous community, grand (?). And those are inherently patriarchal structures, male dominated structures. The end of the day, the participants I spoke to. So men constituted 70% of the initiators or champions that I interviewed. 70% of the operators or members, people who were hands on in the community networks. 50% of the users of community networks, people that don't tend to be in technical decision‑making roles. Only 35% of the nonusers. You can see that there is a clear amount of reproducing the same structure. Right? However end on a positive note. One thing that became clear is many of the women who have slowly had considerable agency or influence in the community network had done so kind of in a quiet way building through the back door. So this is community members who are doing an awful lot of the hard work in keeping the community network going. To begin with, this is the invisible labor plugging phones in to be charged, the husband couldn't be bothered to get out of bed to do. By doing that, they slowly got some considerable power in things. So this is emergent, how do we encourage that.
This I want to end on in terms of the meaningful access. A lot of the women that contributed to keeping the community network going also mentioned contributing work to collectivist practices in the community in themselves. So that is in many Latin America communities they do community work or Indonesia they cook for the community, things like that. So they were also engaged in other activities. They mentioned ‑‑ this is quite interesting thing to end on, perhaps, they were worried about young are women, technically empowered to use the Internet or develop things becoming less and less part of the local community. In a few occasions, I would find those women started entrepreneurial activities. So having to butt against the male governance structure, what they ended up doing was going and starting their own thing. The older women or people that are more of the collectivist activities are worried about this. They said this is not what we want with the Internet. We want them to be part of our community activities. One of the ways through that, I was thinking and speaking in getting quite the attention, is to pay attention and put value on the work they were doing. In all community networks, the women were involved in craft, in cooking and that is often when they used the access for the Internet too. This is also the social glue of the communities. There is a tendency when we talk about community networks to treat those type of uses to the Internet to find out how to create a broach, sell it online, to make a new recipe. There is a tendency that it should be fitted into the corners. Actually, they're an inherent part of the social glue of the community and they shouldn't be treated as frivolous ‑‑ sometimes they are income‑generating, but shouldn't be treated as things that you shouldn't waste valuable Internet resources on. Because actually, they're the things that bring many of the women together and contributing to the community network through doing that. I hope I haven't gone on too long. Maybe I have. Ha‑ha, sorry.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much Nic. Those are certainly valuable input and interesting to hear how the dynamics play out on the ground, you know, when ‑‑ to really find suitable solutions. It is very interesting to hear how complex the dynamics are, something that doesn't always come out. So we really appreciate you bringing forth the ideas to the session today.
This also highlights what we were talking about earlier in terms of how therefore the gender analysis has to be there, from every single step of the way. It is not just something that we can include in the end, because of how complex the dynamics are and the way in which, you know the communities are structured and how they do perpetrate at the end of the day, the same kind of social relations that exist outside of it. So to continue on that ‑‑ to pick up on that strand and to go ahead, I will ask Rashi how ‑‑ some thoughts on how we can integrate the competence into the initiatives every step of the way. From the planning, budgeting, implementation process. Any thoughts and ideas on how this can be implemented given these kinds of dynamics?
>> RASHI: Hi, can you hear me? So I ‑‑ my colleagues and I from the past year have been working on ‑‑ working on agenda perspective on the Internet shutdowns and how it impacts the lives of women in medical. What we did realize is that money pool has always been socially and politically filled with high conflict between ethnic groups, there is a lot of arms conflict. And even though Internet is accessible, the Internet service providers ‑‑ the Internet service providers have ‑‑ it is basically very expensive. We have ‑‑ they have access to low‑quality Internet and there are so many Internet shutdowns that happen, I think the last shutdown that happened was for over a hundred days. It in fact ‑‑ it impacts the social well‑being, the personal and professional lives of women and many of them realize that even the exposure to the basic access or using WhatsApp or Facebook was not that great. So what technical ‑‑ what do you say? The recommendations we would give is build a community network and train them in the basic technical literacy. And probably come up with solutions on how you could build, manufacture and finally be able to monetize using the networks. And also to make sure they are secure enough so they are not available to online violence.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much, Rashi and thank you for bringing out the different aspects of things like Internet shutdowns and how they can specifically affect different communities of women in ways that you were mentioning. So thank you.
We do have ‑‑ as we mentioned, we do have some initiatives that we could find that do have the gender perspectives, to an extent, incorporated in them. Really interested in today's session to also see, you know, how these kinds of initiatives would then look like. You know, so far, we have been talking about how we would like to incorporate these kinds of perspectives into initiatives. We can now maybe look at, you know, what these initiatives would look like. You could probably discuss some existing case studies or ideas for how we can then make these kinds of implementations. Ritu, would you like to start on telling us a little bit about what these kinds of initiatives that do incorporate the gender perspectives we have been talking about so far, what they would look like in practice.
>> RITU SRIVASTAVA: Thanks. I will go back, my colleague has been explaining about what community works were. I come from India and a work for (?) which has the largest community network, with 138 access nodes and connecting 38% of the country.
When we conceptualizes the community networks we did not think about gender. When we think about community networks, we think about the innovative technology, and how it is connected to the community. That is important, when the community is connected, technology is not that important, but how it is sustainable and engaged with the community, that is where it is importance of the place. That is a place where a vacuum is there that community networks are sometimes isolated and sometimes not a part of the ‑‑ it is that women come and play an important role. That is where the community networks have a particular aspect over the women engagement in the community networks, from making them sustainability, managing the client services to the grievances to managing the logs of the particular clients is where the women are playing the role.
Given an example of the networks in India, we were working with women and juniors are not sophisticated. They don't have an engineering degree. They are coming from the local communities, they understand how to engage with us orderly. Not even at a (?) or language or read or write something. The older language they communicate to us is the important aspect for us. The aspect to communicate to us, manage the client relationship. They manage how much money is being spent on one‑person client and how much data their occupying on managing the bandwidth. That entire concept makes this sustainable. That is where the women are playing that role. Some of the women are also trying to ‑‑ it's when we think about technology, we think that women can climb the tower, women will be (?) and fall. It is not like that, they can climb the tower and some of the case studies mentioned, in a GIS watch paper, I shared two stories of women who climbed the tower of 140 meters and also sat on the tower and frank ‑‑ drank their tea as well.
Sometimes the technology and the gender aspect is seen as a balance, trying to make a balance between the technology and according to me, they can go together. Both can be, if you look from the aspect that low cost technology and affordability and aspect that how we can build the minimum oral communication and simple language we can learn, too, we can be talked to about the gender aspect is built out, actually.
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>> And how family economic life can improve. That is what they think about it. If that can happen they can understand any language, whatever language you speak, actually. What was happening is that when we give the technology, they started understanding how this technology can be used for the local content. How they can use the technology for reading designs and archive the designs and how they can understand the new fashion and new technology as well. They can understand what they can use it for, not only for education, also for the job and also for the entertainment. Most of the time, they are prohibited by entertainment. They want to use it for the entertainment purpose as well. So it is ‑‑ if I have to say that these alternative models have not been able to gender specific, some of them are more or less on the platform, the only deep dive into the research and how it can be to the low cost technology and affordability can be given to them. I completely agree with (?) which exist in India a lot. Women are not given the technology on the hands. So if you give the technology. Ownership comes to them. They want the technology and to know how to improve their lives, actually.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Ritu. Thank you for showing your insights and work with us. Some of the initiatives you mentioned were included in the output paper. Agustina can talk about the initiatives that have implemented these gender perspectives. We can understand what that does look like in practice.
>> AGUSTINA CALLEGARI: Thank you, Radhika. First of all, I'm happy to be here today after this very active month of work at BPF. My name is Agustina Callegari. I work for Internet society, and I support the work of BPF this year. What I would like to do is briefly address three initiatives that the Internet society is supporting through our community of chapters that can show us how the gender should be included when developing access to the Internet so we can give communities meaningful access in terms that we have been discussing here at BPF.
We were talking about community network, we hear variable perspectives and comments from everyone. I will be brief about this case, but I especially wanted to mention because I had the possibility to visit the project in Honduras last June. I think Ecuador was around here. I'm not sure of his first date. The support of the project beyond the net grant. When we first receive the application, the gender perspective was not included in there. It is okay. It was a community network. It was focusing on access. Then we started to see in my experience in talking to Ecuador about the project, we saw from indigenous people, in Honduras were populated mostly by women. The project manager on the team realized they needed to do something
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>> AGUSTINA CALLEGARI: To take advantage of the Internet access they were about to have. I think that taking some of the comments that were made by Nic and Rachel. Sorry. And I think that the first thing that help the team to develop this project is the type of activity that women of this community we are doing at that moment. They were by the time running a radio. They had radio program where every morning, they talk about the activities and they communicate with their people about news, different stuff. So the radio was run by women and only by women and they were very proud about this. When they have the radio they ask the chapter that was supporting them, what is next? We need the Internet to have more content for our program. That is what they did. The second part of the gender component of my initiative, it is that they ‑‑ they gave the truth to these women to learn how to use technology for most of them Internet access was something totally new. But also to be able to climb the tower, be able to fix the infrastructure in case they need it. So they were very proud of being able to climb the tower and support the initiative from this crowd.
That is the first part I want to mention. The second one, it is related to public Wi‑Fi. It is a project that is developed in Mexico by the secretary out of communications and transport. That if you seen what they call the digital connected points, it is ‑‑ I don't know how to say it, but it is places where the people can go to have access to the Internet for free. And also to use a computer, and to take an online lessons to run in a specific project about women in S.T.E.M. So they are ‑‑ they were offering young women from different communities to go to this places where they have public Wi‑Fi to take a course on digital skills to support young women from public high schools and encourage them to participate in S.T.E.M. That is the second one.
The third one, we haven't spoken about that is about TV white spaces. Again, we're not focusing on the technology itself, I in fact am not comfortable about TV white spaces, myself, but what I want to mention here is that, again, through our ‑‑ one of the grant programs that the Internet society has, there is a pilot project using TV white spaces to keep it as a community network solution. They decided to give access to three schools in remote areas ‑‑ this has to do with the reality in the country, what they have schools divided by sex. So the target one school, specific for women. And they decided to do the pilot project there, and to give them also the tools to ‑‑ to develop digital skills. So I think that what the third thing have in common more is they didn't start it with the gender approach. But once they have the access and decide there was a need there, they decided to ‑‑ well, to include women and youth gender specific.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Agustina, for telling us about the projects you're involved with. We're trying hard, like she was saying, over the last few months to map them to the best extent in our paper. So the last question for this ‑‑ Renata, you want? Yeah?
>> RENATA RIBEIRO: Hi, sorry. I'm an MAG member, I'm using the speaking queue which is a way to ask for the floor during this IGF. You can find it all on the IGF website. I wanted to make a quick intervention. On the sequence after the panel. These are very interesting cases and studies. But we had ‑‑ we have to get a little bit back to jump forward.
In 2015, the BPF had one of its greatest participations of the year wanted and unwanted, (chuckling). As it tackled the theme violence against women. So there were many trolls that targeted the BPF at one time. In 2016, I have a picture of the room. And it is one of those pictures, be very careful what you ask for. Because you may get it.
So we had a room that 10 people were standing up. And 10 people were sitting on the floor. So busy, it was. And now, we have here in the room less than half of the room. And we're watching ‑‑ we're listening about cases of all over the world. So I think one of the ‑‑ what change? What made the difference? So I think one of the things that changed is two words there. Nonbinary. So there are still so many barriers for the BPF to cross and still so many technologies we have to discuss having other angles in mind on gender other than the one we're searching in. I want to pay attention to the other speaker in the cases again, but I want to say it was a great job and great cases you are bringing. It shows that the BPF is being revolutionary that is bringing something that people are maybe even starting to think about. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you for your input, Renata. Renata has helped us a lot from MAG this year in coming up with the outputs this and bringing this together. Woe are trying to ‑‑ we are trying to move beyond the gender binary. And we can specifically focus on unique needs and challenges the communities face. Unfortunately, so far, we have not mand any specific initiatives along this. The efforts continue and hopefully will be taken forward in future BPFs, if the BPFs get renewed.
So to wrap up this segment, I will ask Anri, quickly, in a minute, give us briefly some key recommendations, policy recommendations, for example, for incorporating gender perspectives in the implementation of supplementary models of connectivity. After that, we can open up ‑‑ after that, we will go into our second segment, because of time. And we will at the end open up comments and questions. We will come back to that in a bit.
>> ANRI VAN DER SPUY: I think I want to say something about what was said about Renata. I want to say the room is much smaller than the previous two instances. I think it is a little bit ‑‑ I think it is ‑‑ as I said when I started talking, I think it is really an interesting revolution to see how the focus of the best practice forum is much more focused, really. And I think that is really ‑‑ that is good, because it also shows ‑‑ if I look at the findings from this year, I think the biggest take away is because there is so much on this. That is why there is a need to work on this. I am glad to hear about the work that is happening at different levels. We can't tackle this properly until we properly understand it. That is why there is a need for the data on the issues. Something they're good at collecting is anecdotal evidence and more qualitative research that can look more in‑depth and the side that show the near discrepancies. I think Rashi, to answer your question, what I can gather from Ritu and Nic is to make sure it isn't tokenistic. That is considering the women that don't mind scaling towers, you know, what does meaningful access mean and how do we be sure that doesn't detract from the community to allow it to remain meaningful. And the words we use do matter. We talk about connecting, enabling, meaningful access, what does that mean? That is something we also need to consider.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Anri, it is a mark of a good segment if we have more questions that those just listening to it.
If I could quickly, because of time constraints, I will open it up for questions. Maybe keep all the comments and questions towards the end, we will spend a good 10 minutes responding to all of them. Please don't worry. I see all the hands up. I will quickly take time for segment two. Can we have Alejandra on stage to join us for segment two. And Bruna as well.
>> RENATA RIBEIRO: I'm sorry, I will jump in because I have to leave. The human rights, gender, and session is in a little while. I hope you will attend, too. To get what she was saying. Yes, we asked for a bigger room and asked to research more. I think that is why we are facing challenges. Perhaps we should look also at initiatives that cannot exist. I was censored three times during the year of this BPF. I did a project on block chain and future of technology and how, with children and children saying that it would be good to have anonymization on the Internet, and this video never ended up being shown anywhere. Another big conference, the kids computer conference, threatened to expel a nonbinary person that is part of the IGF community this year. We tried to tell the story and were censored a lot of different ways. There are many other cases. Where there is smoke there is fire. If we didn't find it we should be looking for it.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you for your inputs, Renata. They're noted as well. Thank you to the speakers in segment one. Join me in thanking the speakers in segment one.
>> Yeah.
>> MODERATOR: We will start segment two now. We will quickly get to the questions after we conclude. We will get to questions and comments toward the end. We will go there when we're done with this. The segment two is focusing on the work of BPF and how to improve going forward, what the different collaborations of different bodies within IGF. The different topics to explore. It is like looking forward to 2019 optimistically. Bruna, if you could give me in a couple of minutes, your thoughts on how to better communication the work of the BPF to the public and what ways to include the relations of BPF gender and IGF. It is important to work in a multistakeholder manner, how can we get better to this?
>> BRUNA MARTINS DOS SANTOS: Can I ask if there is anyone here that works with gender‑related research. Please raise your hand if you are doing any work in the gender area? We have quite a few. Good. I heard the day the friend say he had enough of the gender talk at IGF. Then we still have ‑‑ I mean, it is the fourth year or fifth year of the BPF gender and we still ‑‑ every single year, we get to find a new subject. And we get to find a new topic related it. It is never ending research or project. So, I mean ‑‑ like the answer to this is there isn't enough talk or gender talk at the IGF. We need the space for collaboration and work. I do again with what Angie said earlier, it is a good fact to work the BPF for the nonbinary. I work with an organization called coding rights. Doing digital training, that is focused on women and nonbinary. It is awesome to have a space like this open to this sort of participation.
Then, if whatever we think about how to make this work better recollect ‑‑ better, and what makes this work better and makes our life more complete, it is participation. All of you are invited to collaborate with us. We're open, obviously. We have been doing this work for the past years, like from scratch. And we need help. So if any of you who raised a hand saying a work with gender issues, please do help us, please do. Again, there are a lot of subjects. Like whether or not it is barriers, whether or not it is violence or abuse, it is a never ending thing.
If I could just finishing up, wrapping up the talk, how could we do better bridging with the rest of IGF community and brother IGF community, I think we did a good job two years ago when we mand some of the initiatives around the world. We're doing a little work on capacity building and breaking barriers. So step one would be to reach out to the people and redo the work again, to say hi. We need collaboration on this and we need your work to be part of ours.
I mean, we need to fit into your work because obviously, IGF is a small world and little part of this world. I mean, we could use a little help.
Last but not least, on the how we should do it, with the rest of the IGF community, I would say that the divide and conquer approach would be the best one. If you can get as many people in the other BPF and say can we do a gender approach or talk like this, otherwise it will be like this going technical and masculine conversation that never improves. And finish wrapping up (?) which is starting now, one of the approaches of the high‑level panel is gender. It is another space to keep our eyes at. One of the functions or plans for the high level panel is to strengthen the IGF. It is an outside work to reflect on our work here. Keep an eye in every single space of this community as possible. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Bruna, for the constructive pointers. I think we all agree that gender should be a cross‑cutting team. (Inaudible, multiple people speaking) four that we discussed. Shouldn't be something that is just relegated to specific forums that only discuss gender. So it is something we should speak about in everything from artificial intelligence to cybersecurity. It should really be something that is a perspective that we apply to everything we do at IGF and beyond. Thank you for pointing that out. To end this segment, I would like to ask Alejandra to tell us about what your perspectives are on the topics that BPF can, if renewed, take up next year and how we can improve our collaborations across our different stakeholders
>> ALEJANDRA ERRAMUSPE: Thank you for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here with all of you. I would like to say that I'm happy to see some men in this room. But I really expect to see more men, more women, like Renata said.
If the issues are important for all of us, men and women, not only women issues. I hope in the next year, we're more. Looking at the question, I would like to say I think the BPF should focus on promoting access to science and technology for girls since they are in primary schools or even before. From the first years of life. For that we must work with the education system and families. For that, the BPF would seek to support or get disability, learn from experiences that work in this sense. Because I think with connectivity and devices is not enough to leave anyone behind in the digital world approximate. We must change the construction for women to incorporate themselves in the studies and work with technologies.
I say this with ‑‑ I'm from Uruguay. There, we have no difference in Internet access to access the Internet and devices for women and men. We have a public policy of excellent connectivity. I say that, it is as free as water or air. And we have a public policy for it retires to have their own computer or tablet. It doesn't matter the sex. Women are less involved with the technologies. They continue to probate less and continue to work differently with them. They are still one or two out of 10 students.
We must work on strategies to change socialization patterns, work in collaboration with the educational assistance (?). The experience of working with education system starting from the secondary or university, but it is not enough. There is also, I think they have to start earlier. The construction partners is what is prepared or not of what you want to be or not confirm much earlier in the secondary or school or university. That is why I believe that the BPF should focus on the search for experiences that have to do with this. I also believe in the promotion of the experience. I believe as long as we don't affect this. We won't achieve significant changes in the involvement and equal access of woman in ICT. According to study conducted in Uruguay, it is the same all around the world. It is to explain the low participation of women in science and technology and innovation. The study mentions the importance of addressing the construction of (?) and gender roles in different age groups, in the sense, they say there is no worse discrimination than the one that gets in the mind of the discriminated.
I think it would be positive for BPF to work on this factor and we have to work on this and for that we have to take home to families, to teachers. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Alejandra, for those excellent suggestions on how we can move forward. Hopefully some of those will be taken on board when we focus, in year, if the BPF does get renewed.
I will now open up the floor to questions or comments. We will keep it open for a few minutes. Then the mailing list is always open. Usually we keep engaging on it. Even if you can't bring in your question here, feel free to send us a mail on the mailing list and you will definitely get supplies. I open it up now, if you have questions or comments, raise your hand and we could start.
Okay, sure.
>> RAQUEL GATTO: Thank you. My name is Raquel Gatto, I'm also an MAG member. My name is involved with the BPF because we were defending the BPF within the MAG. And I want to shout out the ladies up‑front. Erica, Paula and others, they worked to make this happen. They are really awesome. I want to say that. Please, let me clap for them. (Applause)
Also, I want to make as a comment, it is really important as we look forward also for next year and the continuation of this discussions. How can we reinforce, and what are the topics, I think we started bringing that up. But also within the MAG, it is minute to show the experience of the discussions and how this outcomes documents can be a reference, not only for governments but stakeholders, they have a tangible results and it can be picked up. So this is also a call for everyone in the room and outside and everyone that can contribute with this discussion, I think it is important to have this in mind. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you for your comments, Raquel. And thank you for your involvement with the session this year. Yes, please.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is (?) Jimenez. I'm one of the IGF fellows here. I want to say so many things. First of all, thank you for this. I think talking about gender ‑‑ and talking about a nonbinary individuals is also something great. And I also hope in the future we can talk about feminism in the Internet as well. Because there are, as you know, feminist principles in the Internet. It would be so great to have a space in events like this as well, even though I know and I understand that it is not that easy, right, because there are barriers to overcome and probably some situations in which some things are censored still because they're unknown for some people. But yeah, I was wondering as well, since we talk about the impact of supplementary models of connectivity, if you consider the existence of autonomous servers, feminist servers, something that you could use as well?
>> MODERATOR: Yeah, thank you so much for the suggestion. We were initially just looking at for different models of connectivity. We were initially looking at four different models of connectivity. That is an excellent suggestion and something we can expand and also look at. So thank you for that. If you know of any specific initiatives, we encourage you to send us those contributions to our mailing list as well.
>> AUDIENCE: Perfect.
>> MODERATOR: Yes.
>> AUDIENCE: (?) sexuality on the Internet. It is two things. The expansion for women and gender nonbinary, I'm so happy. This is hard work. And this is really a nerve in a community that is ‑‑ I'm not so love. I just color my white with pink. I think this panel is intergenerational and the change of people that are talking and leading. (?) forum it is a lot of work. For me, it is interesting listening because it is the basic of feminist and also working inside community. The delegate balance when you enter in a community between the community and the individual and also what we leave behind. Because we can come and make the change and show the light, then we leave, but the people that live in the community, the women and children gender nonbinary, that are outed, they stay. This is at the core when we talk about connectivity and access and all the different layer. I find really interesting that the youngest generation when they're exposed that generate a living. This is also interesting to understand that assistance the community can have, because the community become depleted. It is a lot of work. I don't promise anything. I would not say I wasn't inspired but it is a continuation of work. It is a tough work, and it is important to continue in our different plays with assistance.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you for your input. Are there any other questions or comments? We can take one final comment before we wrap up. Yes, please.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, sorry. This is Jack, also from IPC. I was reluctant to take the floor, I wanted others to speak first. Having been involved in many BPF, it is great to see this one. I want to echo what Raquel is saying. I think the best practice is to bring together a bunch of different stakeholder groups, to discuss what is the best practices, particularly on emerging issues. This can have a big impact. This was talking about online violence many policies were discussing it. That document is still cited as early as the U.N. resolution against violence on women this year. I think it has an impact. Part of the value is it is a cogitating space to figure out an emerging, how it is defined and the influence on the communities. On that, I cannot stress enough the value of the platform and hope that the work continues throughout future years. Secondly, I want to give a concrete recommendation around the how as well, is to make more strong interconnective work with other dynamic coalitions. For example, the dynamic coalition of public libraries, and also community networks, so forth. Finally, a proposal for next year. I think we are working on access for three years now. So I feel that, you know, the landscape has changed, focusing on more specificity, but I want to throw a proposal out there and look at digital economies and work. This is an emerging area with many different intersecting pieces including machine learning, including development, SDGs and access issues in S.T.E.M. as well, that we just raised. I would like to make that suggestion.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you for your comments and your suggestions, Jack. I would like to mention that Jack has been instrumental in all the BPFs so far and even the beginning of this year when we were grappling with this issue and figuring out where to focus on this paper and this session. Jack helped us figure out what the vision could be. Thank you for your involvement with the BPFs and your comments today at the session.
So okay. Maybe we can take one quick final comment.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you. Again, so, to repeat, congratulations to you all. The work has been amazing. And the ability to get your hands on and bring more women to actual deployments and the capacity, and converting the works into action is great. Contributions to you all. Also, we have been in touch this past month with during (?) who was selected as the woman director for the ITU develop sector, which is new it never happened in the last 150 years. We have been talking with her this month and she wants to bring capacity building with girls into what the ITU is doing. She would like to do that. I would like to extend the invitation to you. If we can work together in that, I think it would be amazing.
>> To answer that question, we have been connecting with Maureen because she's the chair of equals, the global partnership for (?) gender divide. I think also in previous years, well, equals is new, but the BPF connecting with equals and we are doing the same this year. We would like to do the same next year for the (?). So thank you very much for your comment.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. So if there are any other questions or comments, if you are not subscribed to our mailing list, please do subscribe, and you can send us e‑mails on that end, we will respond. And the discussions. This session is not meant to have an end to the conversation, it is meant to open up a lot more questions, start a lot more conversations that we will be continuing throughout the IGF's end. That is the motivation. Continue to bring in the wonderful comments.
As I said, we created a draft version of the output paper that has the key findings we were talking about on the beginning. It is on the IGF website, you will find it there. There is an option to add a comment to any of the parts of the paper. If you think that there is something you would like to respond to specifically. You can leave those comments on the website or mail us, that is an option. If there are any initiatives that we have missed out, we would love to hear your inputs, love to hear suggestions, you know, for other spaces that we can look at and focus for this year. So please do send in the suggestions as well. We're very open to receiving those contributions. Finally, I hope that the BPF does get renewed next year. We have had excellent suggestions in today's session on topics to take it forward with.
So that is always a hope. In the end, I would like to thank everyone that has been involved in this process to make all of this happen. It has been a very interesting journey so far, so Agustina for helping coordinate all of this. Paula, who is not on stage here, but she's here. She's been on all the calls and helped us with all the work we put in for the session. Renata from the MAG and Raquel from MAG. Anri who helped with previous BPF. And Jack, who we heard from right now. Bruna. I cannot name every single person who has been involved, but thank you to everyone who has been involved in all the meetings, all the calls. Everyone who submitted inputs, given their comments, reviews, everyone who is present in the session today, all of the speakers as well as all the participants, those who are present in person or remotely. As well as volunteers and those working in the field, thank you for what you submitted to us. Thank you for your effort, the reason we present anything of the sort today is because of the excellent efforts put in my everyone involved. So thank you so much. The main session for gender is now going to start at 4:30 in room 1. So you can head to that. We're thankfully done on time. So thank you so much, once again, for joining us.